(PUC - Rio - 2012)THE INSIDE STORYI live in the st
(PUC - Rio - 2012)
THE INSIDE STORY
I live in the storytelling capital of the world. I tell stories for a living. You’re probably familiar with many of my films, from Rain Man and Batman to Midnight Express to Gorillas in the Mist to this year’s The Kids Are All Right.
But in four decades in the movie business, I’ve come to see that stories are not only for the big screen, Shakespearean plays, and John Grisham novels. 1I’ve come to see that 14they are far more than entertainment. They are the most effective form of human communication, more powerful than 2any other way of packaging information. 3And telling purposeful stories is certainly the most efficient means of persuasion in everyday life, the most effective way of translating ideas into action, whether you’re green-lighting a $90 million film project, motivating employees to meet an important deadline, or getting your kids through a crisis.
PowerPoint presentations may be powered by state-of-the-art technology. But 4reams of data rarely engage people to move them to action. Stories, on the other hand, are state-of-the-heart technology – they connect us to others. They provide emotional transportation, moving people to take action on your cause 9because they can very quickly come to psychologically identify with the characters in a narrative or share an experience – courtesy of the images evoked in the telling.
10Equally important, they turn the audience/listeners into viral 5advocates of the proposition, whether in life or in business, by paying the story – not just the information – forward.
Stories, unlike straight-up information, can change our lives because they directly involve us, bringing us into the inner world of the protagonist. As I tell the students in one of my UCLA graduate courses, Navigating a Narrative World, without stories 15not only would we not likely have survived as a species, we couldn’t understand ourselves. 6They provoke our memory and give us the framework for much of our understanding. They also reflect the way the brain works. 16While we think of stories as fluff, accessories to information, something 7extraneous to real work, they turn out to be the cornerstone of consciousness.
Much of what I know about narrative and its power I learned over the course of working in the entertainment industry. In the early 1980s, I was chairman of PolyGram Filmed Entertainment as well as a producer at that studio. I was pitched a movie to finance and distribute based on 8a book then titled The Execution of Charles Horman. 11It told the true story of Ed Horman, Charles’s father, a politically conservative American who goes to South America in search of his missing journalist son. Ed joins with his daughter-in-law Beth, who, like her husband, is politically polarized from the father, in prying through bureaucracy and dangerous government intrigue in search of their son and husband. Gradually, the father comes to realize his own government is concealing the truth.
Although the project had enlisted a great filmmaker – Oscar winner Costa Gavras (for the thriller Z) – I didn’t find it compelling. A Latin American revolution was a tough sell for a commercial American film, along with the story of a father who had no relationship with his son and the fact that you already knew the ending: the son is dead without the father ever finding him. 12This story was dead on arrival as an investment.
17Out of courtesy, I met with the father, who knew I was not a fan. After a few polite introductions, he nodded to some pictures of my then-teenage daughters on my bookcase. “Do you really know your children?” he asked. “Really know them?” He went on to tell me a story – that the search for his son was more a search for who he was than where he was, because he always suspected he was dead. But the journey was a revelation, 18not least about the many values father and son in fact shared. It was a love story, not a death story.
13His telling engaged me in a unique personal way, emotionally transporting me into the search for his child, and it made me wonder whether I really knew my daughters, their values and beliefs, their hopes and dreams. If the writer could focus the film as a love story/thriller and an actor could engage those emotions and pique those questions, and the film could be executed to get critical acclaim, it really might be worth backing.
By Peter Guber Adapted from Psychology Today – March 15, 2011.http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201103/the-inside-story Retrieved on August 15, 2011
Check the CORRECT statement concerning reference.
In “because they can very quickly come to psychologically identify with” (ref. 9) the pronoun “they” refers to stories.
In “Equally important, they turn the audience/listeners into” (ref. 10), the pronoun “they” refers to people.
In “It told the true story” (ref. 11), “It” refers to the movie.
In “This story was dead on arrival” (ref. 12) the pronoun “This” refers to the story that the father tells.
In “His telling” (ref. 13), “His” refers to the son.
